This baseball player (picture taken circa 1921) is my wife’s father’s father’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s husband. Yes, genealogy is one of my pastimes: Occasionally frustrating, the rare brush with fame (invoking six degrees of separation) can make this hobby worthwhile. Irvin lived 1877-1936.

Born in Wooster, Ohio, Irvin first played professional baseball in 1898 — in Youngstown, Ohio. Two years later, he played in the South Atlantic League and was bought by Birmingham (Alabama). Pittsburgh had him around 1903, and Boston thereafter. In 1907, he returned to Birmingham. Purchased by Brooklyn, he stayed there for eight years, finally jumping to Baltimore in 1915. He was in Elmira when the U.S. entered the war and left to become a government inspector of motors. Subsequently, he started a business in Buffalo but baseball lured him back: this time to Jersey City.

A scout, coach, and occasional pitcher for Philadelphia in 1921, Irvin became their manager in August of that year and remained so all of 1922. In 1930, he coached at the University of Rochester — in which city he died.

The “K” stood for Key, but because of the prominence, in the news of the day, of Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany 1888-1918, Irvin, at some point, found himself nicknamed “Kaiser” or — more affectionately — “Kize”. The connection to my wife’s family (circa 1918) was Irvin’s second marriage, to which he brought a son from his first. Here is an assemblage of three Irvin Wilhelm baseball cards scrounged from the Net.